Rebel Ideas and Rebel Realities

• In Event: Rebel Institutions and Interests

Abstract

Rebels put considerable energy into explaining what they do and why they do it. Narratives that are legible enough to mobilize potential supporters on the ground relieve rebels from having to directly control people. Effective narratives encourage collusion and distinguish rebels from the intimate world of personal grievances, social networks, and local norms that recruits bring with them. Rebels also need narratives to attract material resources and political support through connections to foreign officials, organizations, and ideas. In this paper, we build on existing literature on rebel groups’ organizational cohesion and use evidence from Somalia and Afghanistan to show that the relationship between rebel groups’ narratives and their strategic environment has undergone a significant shift between the end of the Cold War and the advent of the so-called War on Terror. This shift, we argue, is three-pronged. First, new information technology makes it harder for rebels to maintain message unity and hence undermines the rebels’ ability to maintain the internal cohesion of the group. Second, by giving people and local communities more options to choose from, new information technology further exacerbates the fragmentation of the social environment in which most recent and contemporary intrastate conflicts have been fought, hence making communities harder to mobilize. And third, at the geopolitical level, the criminalization of rebel behavior that accompanies the use of new information technology strongly discourages international support for their cause.

Author

• William Reno, Northwestern University